Ghanaians urged to return to natural foods for healthy life
Dr Emmanuel Kwame Asenso, the Director of Health Talk Limited, on Monday cautioned Ghanaians about what they consumed as food, which accounts for the rising disease burden and youthful deaths in recent times.
He said one area that most people failed to exercise self-control was what they ate and drunk, which affected their emotional well-being, physical fitness, and spirituality.
Dr Asenso said for Ghana to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, there must be a culturally developed Blue Print that promoted the consumption of natural local foods and herbs, whilst ensuring cleanliness and maintaining healthy green environments.
These, he said, would not only ensure a healthy population, but also promote and expand the Government’s agenda regarding the Planting for Food and Jobs, and protect the country from being a receptacle for junk.
Dr Asenso was addressing a press conference on the topic: “Your Health; Toxins and Detoxification” in Accra on Monday.
He said: “Food is the best medicine and the best medicine is food,” therefore, people must be encouraged to eat foods in their natural form, drink a lot of water, and stay away from additives.
Dr Asenso said good holistic nutrition, though very important, was visibly missing in school curricula and advocated that all children should be taught both the vegetarian and non-vegetarian lifestyles and their impact on health.
That, he said, would provide individuals the opportunity to make informed decisions about their diet and general health.
“Most people in this contemporary society have forgotten that the best investment in life is the investment in health,” he said, and called for occasional detoxification therapy, which was a systemic approach to assisting the body to remove toxins in the tissues.
Dr Asenso said unfortunately in modern times people consumed products from profit seeking industries that did not care much about the ethics of food production and the ultimate effects on the consumer.
As a result, most of the foods on the market were polluted with chemicals, both canned and fresh, while others were genetically altered and continued to be modified with no guarantees on what the future held, he said.
Subsisting on foods that have been processed and loaded with toxic additives would overwhelm the body and alter its effective functioning.
Dr Asenso said what many people failed to recognise was that the body could become overloaded with toxins as a result of lifestyle habits such as poor diet and limited physical activity coupled with excessive drugs and alcohol intake.
He said it was the deviation from nature that was causing those illnesses, as God who created humans had not changed the natural laws that guided health, hence people ought not to deviate from the natural ways of living.
He said staying healthy was a serious responsibility for all, no matter their level of education or social status, as there was currently gross misinformation about what constituted good protein, calcium and carbohydrates due to scientific reductionism.
He said due to the wrong emphasis or shift in paradigms for addressing health problems, there seem to be no effective methods in helping people cure themselves of the chronic but preventable lifestyle diseases.
He advised Ghanaians to shed their western cultural indoctrination and dogma and return to the old ways of securing the natural environment and water resources, while trusting in God and showing benevolence and gratitude to each other.
Source: GNA